A Tiny Tribute

In America we have largely forgotten where Veterans Day came from.  On the 11th of November we put out flags and remember our Veterans.  Well that is what we do if we are not hitting a Veterans Day sale or planning a barbecue.  With each passing day the memory of why we celebrate the 11th day of the 11th month grows fainter.  Scarcely a person alive today aside from a historian remembers the 11th hour.  The Eleventh hour was when the guns fell silent.  Guns that in four year rattled the very foundations of humanity an changed the world forever, shaping the world that we know today.  Once known simply as Armistice Day it was the moment that World War One came to an end.  To be more precise, the moment it ended on the battle field.

Kaiser Franz Josef I

You see, the repercussions of this conflict still echo imperceptibly in the world we live today.  While the thunderous clap of cannons is no more, everything about our technology, government, economy and social systems can be directly linked to a conflict that in four years re-shaped the world.  Prior to 1914 the world was defined by empires and monarchies.  Democracy was an ember around the world yet for most it had not yet been realized.  Power was centered in the elegant halls of the Hapsburgs, Kaiser Wilhelm and Czar Nicholas the Second of Russia.

In four short years, less then half the time of our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan all of these empires were brought to their knees and 17 million soldiers and civilians were dead.  Lost in this carnage is a deeper story.  It is a story of how in four short years the world changed.  Women stepped up and became part of our work force.  Many obtained the rights of suffrage.  The world of horses and manual labor gave way to the world of machines.  Machines that dug, drove and flew.  Communication systems were built.  Medical advancement was tremendous as blood transfusion and methods of physical reconstruction were explored.  New methods of killing were developed intertwining forever technology and death.

Economic systems changed from aristocratic dictates to complex markets.  As monarchical systems crumbled ownership exploded and a middle class was born.  It is no mistake that in the Europe of today only shells of monarchies remain amongst the victors like the British Royal Family, the Belgian King, Dutch or other Nordic Royalty.  Yet among the losers, monarchy vanished completely.  Royal houses fell like dominoes in Austria, Hungary, Serbia, Italy, Germany and most notably Russia.  In the later the seeds of Communism were laid that would eventually spread across Europe and Asia and set the stage for the next 70 years of conflict.  America became a world power and developing nations around the world looked out from the cloak of colonialism and asked for their own rights of self determination.

I could write pages about how the conflict formed the world that we know today but for myself it all came to together in 2001 when I read a newspaper article about an old World War I veteran named Mr. Henderson who was still alive and in a rest home in Columbia, South Carolina.  I remembered a story from my own youth when my mother and her mother came across General Omar Bradley in a train station.  General Bradley was a hero from World War Two and my grandmother took my mother up to him and told her to shake his hand.  She wanted her to shake the hand of a great man.  So with 105 year old Mr. Henderson in my mind I telephoned his 80 year old daughter and asked her if I could meet him.  She agreed and my wife, son and I all visited him at the rest home.  His eyes were still sharp as was his mind.  I handed him a small tin box that was a medical kit used by American soldiers in France.  His eyes lit up and he said he remembered many of those over there.  My son and I shook Mr. Henderson's hand and I knew that through the blood and flesh of this man I had touched history.

Mr. Henderson is gone now as are all the men who served in that war so long ago.  Yet the changes attributed to the conflict still remain and shape the world we live in.  They touch every part of our lives.  They exist in the governments we live under and in the social freedoms we experience.  They exist in the technology we use to live our lives.  They exist in the position of American in the world and in the collective European consciousness.  They exist in the endless rows of white crosses that fill the forgotten cemeteries in Europe.  They exist in the pages of photo albums that sit dusty on our shelves painted in the smiles and frowns of lives that are now fading memories.

On this eleventh day of the eleventh month of the eleventh year when the clock reaches the eleventh hour look beyond Veterans Day and remember the moment when the guns fell silent and the world was changed forever.